The Wild Swans Quotes & Sayings

While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister. — Jung Chang

Immorality is glorified today. The Scripture teaches that God hates immorality! The ideal of purity is scorned, immorality is laughed at in school - "God is old-fashioned!" What else can we expect but that thousands of our young people are growing up to be immoral?7 — Billy Graham

Notes for a ballet, The Spell: ... Suddenly Sigmund hears the flutter of wings, and a group of wild swans flies across the moon ... Sigmund is astounded to see that their leader is part swan and part woman - unfortunately, divided lengthwise. She enchants Sigmund, who is careful not to make any poultry jokes ... — Woody Allen

The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul Of that waste place with joy Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear The warble was low, and full and clear. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

The recollected go forth to lives of renunciation. They take no pleasure in a fixed abode. Like wild swans abandoning a pool, they leave one resting place after another. — Gautama Buddha

No, you will never been tamed, you are a monster, the eternal wild one. I often wonder where you came from, only someone with something to hide has such a cloudy beginnings. Who are you? Or more importantly who were you? There is only the odd bits that are known about you and nothing is set in stone. Do you even know the real you behind the charade? The fact that you are aroused by virginity, is a worrying fascination. I would not be surprised if the person who turned you realised what a monster he'd created. They were not called Frankenstein by any chance? Maybe you are a creature of many parts? Did you destroy your creator as well in a fit of rage? Is that why your are always looking for your virgin bride? Only you take beautiful swans and turn them into ugly ducklings. You will never return to that life that you give up. Stop trying to recreate them. — Beverley Price

Great," mumbles Kelly. "Bat stew cooked on a bat shit fire by an old bat. — Philip Webb

The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud
With white neck peering to the evening clowd.
The weary rooks to distant woods are gone.
With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on
To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow
While small birds nestle in the edge below. — John Clare

I thought acting was all about natural instinct but I've realised, through working with so many talented actors on 'Wild Swans' and 'Run,' that I can see the training. That's why I am back at drama school. — Katie Leung

She says, "I'm going to live. And nobody's going to stop me." She believes every word of it. — Peadar O'Guilin

Every aspect of our lives plays out in two versions: one conscious, which we are constantly aware of, and the other unconscious, which remains hidden from us. — Leonard Mlodinow

The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There's an algorithm for this, a data mining method called "automated social hierarchy detection," developed at Columbia University.8 When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person's emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures. — Daniel Goleman

Some full-breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

And I know when I was younger, and still, I always marvel at what I feel is different from what I'm told that I'm supposed to feel. — Andrew McCarthy

Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying! — Edna St. Vincent Millay

This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game. — Robinson Jeffers

Shiva ... is the only hunter that will ever catch the wild swan; The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of the beauty of things. Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme, Empty darkness under the death-tent wings. She will build a nest of the swan's bones and hatch a new brood, Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed. — Robinson Jeffers

The lightsome countenance of a friend giveth such an inward decking to the house where it lodgeth, as proudest palaces have cause to envy the gilding. — Philip Sidney

I can be ruthless, unforgiving, and a manipulative bastard. But I don't play games with sex. — Naima Simone

FRANK: Do you know Yeats?
RITA: The wine lodge?
FRANK: No, WB Yeats, the poet.
RITA: No.
FRANK: Well, in his poem 'The Wild Swans At Coole',Yeats rhymes the word "swan" with the word "stone". You see? That's an example of assonance.
RITA: Yeah, means getting the rhyme wrong. — Willy Russell

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years. May you wake up ... and start dancing while you're still half-asleep. May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses ... My you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds, and one extrasolar planet ... May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans. — Rob Brezsny

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. — Seamus Heaney

One day in May, the whiteness in Milo's brain turns into that of a flock of Canadian geese that fills the entire sky. Pan to the young man staring up at them. Clinging to his arm is a pert and pretty, dark-haired girl by the name of Viviane, also looking up. Their mouths are open in amazement. Milo recites a few lines from "The Wild Swans at Coole." De trees are in deir autumn beauty, De woodland paths are dry, Under de October twilight de water Mirrors a still sky; Upon de brimming water among de stones Are nine-and-fifty swans. Viviane looks at him adoringly. "Sounds beautiful!" she says. "Who's it by?" "Yeats." "Never heard of him. — Nancy Huston

Looking back few friends had we
but I've got him and he's got me.
And when the golden minute comes
when we no longer wake to smell
the river where the wild swans sailed
the orchard where the blossoms fell,
we'll smile a little thinkin' of that.
Me in my shirt-tails, him with his whiskers
me and the cat. — Rod McKuen

'Wild Swans' showed me there are Chinese traditions that still affect my life. For example, it's not that women are inferior, exactly, but my dad and my brother are the most important men in my life and I would do anything for them. I feel like I should be the one cooking and looking after them. — Katie Leung

And the black box in her arms whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered. To be the kind of duck who gets included by wild swans — Nell Zink